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A thank you to all Canadians is found in Trudeau’s apology to Sikhs: Grewal

In his apology to Sikhs for the Komagata Maru incident more than a century ago, Prime Minister Trudeau thanked all Canadians.

'They came all the way from Toronto. I can't believe that,' said one Fort McMurray woman when she saw the members of the Singh Khalsa Sewa Club arrive in Lac La Biche with supplies for evacuees. (Katie Daubs / Toronto Star file photo)

“To admit Orientals in large numbers would mean the end, the extinction of the white people. And we always have in mind the necessity of keeping this a white man’s country.” — Sir Richard McBride, B.C. premier, 1914.

Sorry Sir McBride, a hundred years on and Canada — with our TV ads featuring mixed-race couples and a ruling party that could pass for the UN — isn’t the place you tried to protect.

But these days it’s not just our own history that we seem out of place with.

Across the border Donald Trump’s xenophobia is flourishing. In Europe nationalist groups are on the rise. And, throughout the World Wide Web, garden-variety racists have found a limitless space in which to thrive.

Like many other Sikh-Canadians, such attitudes, voiced decades earlier in McBride’s jingoism, would become familiar to me. His pronouncement in 1914 came the day before a chartered Japanese ship filled with a few hundred Indians, mostly Sikhs, tried unsuccessfully to deposit all its passengers — permanently — on the British Columbia coast.

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s formal apology Wednesday in the House of Commons for the Komagata Maru episode brings a sense of closure for many.

While I have no doubt benefited from the struggles of those who came to Canada before me, watching my own family navigate its way through Canadian society has left a different impression about the lessons learned from the Komagata Maru.

Growing up in Brandon, Manitoba in the ’70s and ’80s, my brother and I were the only two turban-wearing Sikh boys in a rural prairie town. Life didn’t much resemble my family’s past experience. We had left Lusaka, Zambia, where I was born and where my Punjabi-Indian parents had settled after my father’s family said goodbye to the subcontinent decades earlier, sailing off to what would be called Tanzania (not long after the Komagata Maru set sail) as it moved from British rule toward its independence.

Brandon turned out to be as tolerant and multicultural, at least in its attitudes, as any place I’ve known. There were tensions, primarily between old guard locals and members of the various First Nations communities who came to town.

A benefit of my family’s intercontinental experience was an inevitable sense that McBride’s fear of “Orientals” could be overcome, pushed aside in places around the world where people’s ambitions, not their appearance, signalled both their chances for success and the extent to which they would influence their surroundings.

British Columbia’s First-World-War-era premier seemed genuinely bewildered by this. For McBride, at least in my interpretation, it was not the overwhelming number of “Orientals” trying to beat down the door that might extinguish his people from Canada; it was their industry. He was so impressed, I thought, by the will of those nomadic survivors that he felt genuinely fraught about his own inability to survive alongside them.

In his 1978 book, Orientalism, the Palestinian writer and academic Edward W. Said laid out a sweeping theory of Western views toward other cultures, particularly Arab culture, but also other Eastern ways of life.

His premise is that the West’s need to “rescue” the East stems not only from a sense of its superiority over these cultures, but also because they are so extremely different. The unknown spaces between these differences, Said wrote, have been filled by interpretations of them that are confused by fear — much like McBride’s apparent belief that those passengers on that ship represented an effort to push him aside.

In our post-multicultural world here in Canada, as the experiment unfolds, many of us have adopted one of two views, each represented in a book that has gained in prominence.

Author Neil Bissoondath argued in Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (published in 1994 with a revised edition in 2002) that the experiment was failing. The national policy formalized under the 1988 Multiculturalism Act, he wrote, had created a framework that protects tribes from one another, while they descend into their own isolation. Places such as Brampton, Markham and Surrey, B.C., with their so-called ethnic ghettoes, are provided as proof of Bissoondath’s claims, by those who support his views.

Others point to a competing example. In his 2000 book, The Global Soul, Pico Iyer includes a chapter titled, “The Multiculture.” Iyer, who was born to Indian parents, in England, and was raised in the U.S. before he moved to Japan, chose, out of all the places he’s visited around the world, to set this chapter in Toronto.

Describing Toronto at the time, and contrasting it with the “class divisions” of its “Old World roots,” Iyer wrote: “The fact remained that the most multicultural city in the world, by UN calculations, was also the ‘Queen City’ of a country that had placed first for five straight years, in the UN’s Human Development Index, which ranks 174 countries for quality of life. And the ‘most cosmopolitan city on earth,’ as a local columnist called it, was also, statistically, the safest city in North America.

“It all raised the possibility, exhilarating to contemplate, that a city made up of a hundred diasporas could go beyond the cities that we knew.”

The cynics will argue that Trudeau’s gesture Wednesday toward generations of South Asian Canadians is just good politics; it keeps the tribes in numerous ridings happy. This is the view of the divisive politics of multiculturalism outlined in Bissoondath’s book.

But maybe the gesture can be seen as more of a thank you than an apology.

To a community that embodies what Iyer was getting at.

And to a bigger community, the Canadian community, that seems as though it stands in great contrast to many places across the world these days.

Our Prime Minister stated in his apology that “Canada is a country unlike any other.”

In praising all of us for our contributions, and singling out those who came here from abroad, he remarked that these people have brought “to Canada the very best of who they are.”

There are places around the globe confused about all of this.

Places where some would not be moved by the acts of a group of young men from Brampton last week.

The men drove in a convoy, with a truck loaded full of supplies, to Fort McMurray. Many are recent immigrants. In their bright turbans, they handed out baby food and fruit and medicine, before turning around to head back home, across their country.

Not turned away as were the Sikhs on that ship more than a century ago.

Those in Fort McMurray, ravaged by fire, are just as much a part of . . . the multiculture.

They thanked their fellow Canadians who had made the trek.

“Hello, neighbour,” one of them said, describing the young men as some of the little angels that had appeared every day.

They were all simply Canadians, nothing more, nothing less.

In it together.

So, to you Sir Richard McBride, wherever your spirit may be, think of today’s words by our Prime Minister! Your own words, uttered so long ago, may still reflect the popular mood in too many corners of the world, but here, they remind us that a much better version for the future is being shaped.

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